Author and publication bias aside… I don’t find the author persuasive at all. It’s saying misused equipment and poorly supported logistics result in subpar performance. That’s like… any weapons systems. Look how the Russian tanks got decimated last year by missiles and drones. Was it because Russian tanks were bad? No - because they were sent without infantry support which is a flagrant doctrinal negligence.
Besides the JDAM failures (which do represent a genuine changing landscape of combat expectations), I'm not really sure what they're getting at here. The majority of this article is an attrition catalog with price comparisons of imported US weapons to improvised ones, which is the whole "barrel bomb" discussion all over again. On top of that, there's really not a whole lot to criticize considering how little the US has actually given to Ukraine. The US would have to commit much harder before they were humiliated, at least in Ukraine's case specifically.
No surprise that US military planners have been planning for the wars we've actually been fighting, which are low-intensity counterinsurgency operations. The goal is to minimize US and civilian casualties in an environment where we have superiority in air, land, and sea.<p>And it makes sense to do that. If we ever have a shooting war against Russia or China, the nukes will start flying and a) many people will die, but also b) our existing weapons supplies and industry will be destroyed.<p>We're building weapons that are well suited for the environment they are meant to be used in.
> <i>its crumbling defenses around Kharkiv</i><p>Uh, Russia is losing over a thousand soldiers a day for minimal gains. “Crumbling” is an odd way to describe a line being held.